NetBSD/mvme68k History

Originally ported by Chuck Cranor based on Paul Mackerras' old DA30 code, NetBSD/mvme68k has been supported since the NetBSD 1.1 release.

The NetBSD/mvme68k 1.1 release was fairly basic; running as a diskless NFS client with no SCSI or parallel printer support, and only two of the four serial ports working. The boot process was quite long-winded; transfer a first-stage bootloader using srecords over a serial port from a second host computer, transfer a second-stage bootloader using TFTP over the ethernet from the server, finally grab the kernel from the mvme68k root file-system image on the NFS server.

At about this time, Steve Woodford discovered NetBSD/mvme68k and over the coming months added SCSI and parallel printer support. Booting from SCSI disk was first supported in the 1.2 release, although the system still had to be installed using the original netboot method described above due to problems with booting from tape.

Up to and including the NetBSD 1.2 releases, the NetBSD/mvme68k release sets consisted of a couple of compressed tar files; one for root, the other for /usr. As of NetBSD 1.3, however, the release follows the official NetBSD convention, including a comprehensive installation script. Additionally, booting from SCSI tape is now supported, so an NFS server is no longer required to enable system installation.